Many of the claims are premature, oversold, and/or just plain wrong, and every now and again it's time for a backlash. Backlashes provide much needed airtime for critiques of grossly oversold neuroscientific claims, with great work done by regular bloggers such as Neuroskeptic, Neurocritic, Neurobollocks etc.

But sometimes the backlash strays from specifics to a general condemnation of the field (recent examples can be found in the Guardian and New York Times). Neuroscience is then recast as a form of mania, neuromania, with slick sales teams peddling neurohype to an ever-credulous public.

Worse, neuroscience is said to be misguided "in principle": the brain is the wrong place to look to understand phenomena of mind. The "in principle" critique comes roughly in three flavours. The first is not really an "in principle" critique at all – it simply lists examples of failures in practice (eg poorly controlled experiments, weak data, logically flawed inferences, etc).

Bad neuroscience is like any bad science – conclusions are only as valid as the quality of the evidence. "In practice" limitations are extremely important for evaluating current claims and improving future research (for example see Kate Button on statistical power, Alok Jha on fraud and misconduct and Ed Yong on replication studies), but tell us nothing about the "in principle" limits of neuroscience.

The next argument states that we cannot understand the mind by studying the brain in isolation. We are more than our brains. Our experience is embedded in the world, not just 3 pounds of fatty tissue encased in the dark wet cavity of the skull.

But again, this is a straw man argument. Neuroscience is not about the brain in a jar. At almost every turn, neuroscience studies how brains interact with the world, including the inanimate objects of our environment, but also other biological agents (people) and societies, histories and futures, culture, language, music, etc.

Without an extended body, and an external environment rich in the myriad wonders that make life worth living, there would simply be no point in having a brain at all, and certainly no point in studying it. But the situated nature of the living brain does nothing to downgrade its role in mind. The brain is the nexus of these causal influences. Nothing is registered, nothing experienced, unless such phenomena somehow become manifest in the biology of the brain. The neurocentric view places the brain at centre stage.

Finally, it is sometimes argued that the human brain is just too complex to understand. This is perhaps the least intellectually satisfying argument, but also impossible to refute. The same can be said for problems in quantum physics, or any other field of study. It is like debating unknown unknowns with Donald Rumsfeld – how can we predict a priori which questions of mind will yield to neuroscientific explanation, and which will continue to evade it? Philosophers like necessary truths, but to me the limit is simply an empirical question.

Neuroscience is still in its infancy. Functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) only came on the scene in the 1990s, but has since revolutionised research in normal healthy human subjects, allowing us to track patterns of brain activity associated with perception, action and everything in between: from memory, decision-making and cognitive control to free will, consciousness and dreams.

Although fMRI dominates public perception of neuroscience, it is worth noting that it is just the tip of the neuro-iceberg. There are many other tools available, each with their own strengths and weaknesses, and many more are being developed. For example, optogenetics now allows neuroscientists to selectively activate extremely well-specified neuronal populations using high-precision light pulses, and nanotechnology will soon allow us to perform micro-scale measurements at an unprecedented macro-scale.

So why all the fuss about neuroscience, good and bad? Every discipline has its limitations, and no one can predict what the future holds, in principle or in practice. But neuroscience seems to attract a particular kind of interest and controversy. Some have argued that we are simply beguiled by beautiful brain images, but it seems a bit too simple to suggest that the neuromanic public has been hypnotised en masse by the beauty of fMRI, leaving all critical faculties behind.

I would suggest that we are deeply captivated by the physical correlates of mind. Many studies that make it into the news are simple variants of: cognitive states A and B are associated with different brain states X and Y. The details of how and why these patterns differ might have important neuroscientific implications, but usually the main thrust of the mainstream news story focuses on the mere fact of difference.

If we truly accept the materialist worldview of modern times (everything is composed of material, and all phenomena – even mind – arise through material interactions), then a basic neural difference does not strictly teach us anything new, because for every difference in mental state, there must also be an associated difference in the brain.

Yet still, the basic demonstration that our private inner mental world systematically maps to patterns of brain activity feels like it is an impossible feat, like some miracle of transubstantiation that either captivates or scandalises. We may call ourselves materialists, but at heart we often still think like dualists (mental phenomena are non-physical, separate from the brain). Implicit dualism may help to explain why some relatively pedestrian findings get so much airtime (just the wonder of mind made flesh), and why some critics refuse to accept that the brain can betray mysteries of the mind.

Mark Stokes is a senior research fellow at the Oxford Centre for Human Brain Activity, University of Oxford. He has written more about how neuroscience can reveal mysteries of the mind on his blog Brain Box. Follow him on Twitter @StokesNeuro